Abstract:The security of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) systems draws more and more attention nowadays. Intrusion detection systems are often deployed on the backhaul network to protect the AMI head-end system. In this paper, we proposed an efficient way to build threat detecting mechanism in AMI systems with the help of software defined networks (SDN). Moreover, we also enhance the OpenFlow architecture to provide more powerful detection mechanism to secure the AMI system. The proposed solution not only enhances the security of AMI systems, but also preserves the traffic quality of this structure.